Indie rockers rule Junos, while host Drake is shut out

The Juno Awards did a fine job of covering the bases this year in all respects but one: they neglected to give their host, homecoming Toronto hip-hop hero Drake, a single trophy of his own.

Instead, the job of “owning it” at the 40th-anniversary Juno ceremony broadcast live on CTV from the Air Canada Centre on Sunday night fell to Montreal indie-rock ensemble the Arcade Fire, who wound up with four trophies in their possession as Juno Week festivities in Toronto drew to a close.

The band, fresh off an upset Album of the Year win at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles last month, collected an Album of the Year Juno, too, for last year’s much-celebrated international hit The Suburbs. Bragging rights for Artist of the Year and Group of the Year were also the Arcade Fire’s, while three tunes from The Suburbs – “Ready To Start,” “We Used to Wait” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” – were enough to secure the group Songwriter of the Year honours, as well. Not a bad haul on the night, considering The Suburbs had already taken Alternative Album of the Year at the pre-broadcast Juno gala dinner at the Allstream Centre on Saturday night. Oh, and they delivered a walloping performance of “Rococo” on the broadcast to top it all off.

Drake, on the other hand, didn’t wind up with anything to show for his six nominations. HisThank Me Later even lost to Shad’s TSOL in the Rap Album of the Year category on Saturday night, surprising many.

He did a decent job of hosting the show, though, and showed a reasonably deft hand at comedy during pretaped interludes that variously had him plotting a Call of Duty videogame night with CTV anchor Lloyd Robertson and rollin’ with his “Old Money” posse of blinged-out and possibly armed senior citizens.

The other multiple winners as the weekend wound down were polar opposites, generationally speaking, but – taken in tandem with the Arcade Fire’s successes – definitely indicative of the more inclusive nature of the present-day Juno Awards.

Can-rock icon Neil Young, on hand at Sunday’s ceremony to accept the Allan Waters Humanitarian Award, added an Artist of the Year title to the Adult Alternative Album of the Year he scooped up for Le Noise on Saturday evening.

His heartfelt acceptance speech – “Just look inside yourself and look inside the eyes of your friends and you’ll find the secret of being a humanitarian” – for the Allan Waters award was utterly, wonderfully Neil-like and one of the night’s highlights. He also ensured his place in Juno video reels for an eternity to come by hoisting his Artist of the Year trophy and offering the doting crowd an “Oh, Canada” later in the night.

It was a lot of Neil Young all at once, considering the Winnipeg-raised, Toronto-born legend isn’t typically that generous with his public appearances. For a notoriously shy guy, though, he was remarkably funny and chatty backstage.

“It’s very unusual for me to be this exposed,” he conceded to the press room. “Maybe if I’d been this exposed a long time ago people would know what I’m like. I’m just trying to be myself and avoid the teleprompter as much as possible.”

Stratford-raised teen-pop sensation Justin Bieber, meanwhile, scooped up a pair of statuettes of his own during the Juno broadcast. His My World 2.0 was named Pop Album of the Year, while he rather predictably overtook Drake, Hedley, Michael Buble and Sarah McLachlan in the race for the viewer-voted Juno Fan Choice Award.

Bieber was in Europe for the affair, albeit present via videotape Skyping with his friend Drake in an oddly homoerotic opening sequence and saying his pre-recorded “thank yous” from afar at the appropriate moments. The young pop-culture phenomenon’s absence didn’t seriously diminish the Juno show’s superstar wattage, however, with the likes of Drake, Young, the Arcade Fire, McLachlan and Bryan Adams – in town to induct another pop titan, Shania Twain, into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame – in the building. In terms of “star power,” it might as well have been the Grammys, a fine testament to how much the Canadian music industry has matured since the Junos began in Toronto as the Gold Leaf Awards 40 years ago.

Timmins-born Twain, reappearing after a long media silence, was particularly effusive in her praise for her home nation, joking onstage that “I feel like I should be wearing the Canadian flag.”

She was similarly gracious backstage. “There’s no day like today,” she said, keeping humble in the face of her Hall of Fame honours and brushing off. “Honestly, what can I say? This is a really big moment and it feels very genuine in every way …

“I don’t feel iconic. I don’t feel that way at all. I feel like a small-town girl from Timmins. That’s never going to change. I’m 45 years old … That’s who I am.”